The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Well, up on that hill was this cluster of buildings, and Doc Swain broke the silence that had come on him with thoughts of Kie Raney’s oath in order to start telling me about those buildings, even before we got to them. The buildings were still being used as a public school, shut down now for the summer, but Doc explained they had once been a private school, the Newton County Academy it was called, although the local folks had referred to it as “the college.”

  Back in the years after that first great war, the one that involved the whole world, folks were so poor in Newton County that there wasn’t enough money raised from the taxes on their property to support public schools. Of course Stay More had had its own elementary school, first through eighth grades, for some time, and at one time Jasper, the county seat, had had a kind of high school, which is where your Latha Bourne went, riding in each day with Raymond Ingledew in his buggy, a long way to go for an education.

  So a lot of Newton County people were willing to listen when the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention proposed that a “mountain mission school” be established to provide some good education for the backwoods boys and girls of the hill country. If you know anything about the Baptists, you know how partial they are to “missions,” either foreign or domestic. A mission is a kind of meddling. Its purpose is to convert. The Baptists came into Newton County—hell, they didn’t come in; they’d already been there ever since displacing the unconverted Indians—and they decided to build their mission school to convert the older boys and girls from heathen illiterates into good Baptist Bible readers.

  That was a period, just at the start of what the rest of the country knew as the Jazz Age, when the Baptists were somehow raising the money to build these schools in several places around the Ozarks and Ouachitas—at Blue Eye, Missouri, and in Arkansas at Maynard, Hagarville, Mt. Ida, and Parthenon. They chose Newton County because they considered it “the most destitute field in Arkansas,” and they picked Parthenon instead of the county seat at Jasper only because Parthenon is closer to the geographic center of Newton County. With the help of “subscriptions” from some of the better-heeled upstanding Parthenonians, and a few Stay Morons, like John Ingledew the banker, who, although he had no use for the Baptists, being like all the Ingledews not so much an atheist as a nontheist, was willing to put up a couple hundred dollars as his share toward building the campus. The main building alone cost $15,000, the most money that had ever been spent on a single structure in Newton County. Even abandoned for the summer, with some windows broken and dust everywhere, as it was when Colvin took me through it, it was still impressive: the largest stone building anyone had ever seen or imagined, two whole floors of six classrooms and an auditorium that would seat two hundred. It had even had a library! Nobody had ever heard of one of them things before, and thought it was some kind of berry which would turn you into a liar if you ate it. Although the contents had not been considerable, maybe three hundred volumes all told, it was the only thing approaching a book repository in all of that country. But when the building had changed hands from the Baptists to the state of Arkansas after a decade, the library had disappeared.

  The Baptists had sent a young flatlander lady, Miss Jossie Conklin, to be the head of what was officially named Newton County Academy. Naturally the locals considered her a “furriner,” because she was from a “foreign country”—Texas. She had graduated from Baylor College, the biggest Baptist school in Texas, and she also had a “B.M.T.” from one of those angel factories, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, where she’d met the feller Tim James, who not only outranked her with a “Th.M.” but would also replace her after a couple of years as principal of the Newton County Academy, which he accomplished by marrying her. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  Shapely Miss Jossie just showed up one day at Colvin’s door and commenced talking a blue streak. He had some trouble understanding her at first, because of her Texas accent, and he mistook her for one of those women homesteaders who had invaded the Ozarks a few years earlier. He kept waiting for her to reveal what her ailment was. He was mighty glad to have an awake visitor to his office, the first in a coon’s age, and he suspected that she was such a foreigner she hadn’t even heard about the dream cure that everybody else was freely availing themselves of. He hoped she had something really serious wrong with her, so he could make her into his first paying patient in over a year. But the longer he listened to her, the clearer it became that she didn’t really have anything wrong with her, or, rather, she had a whole bunch of problems but they weren’t medical. He offered her a drink of Chism’s Dew to calm her down, but she managed to blurt out that she never in her life had ever touched a drop. Even without the Chism’s Dew, he managed to get her to slow down and repeat some of the more difficult parts of what she was saying.

  Finally he understood that this pretty gal in her ruffled blouse and smocky jumper was offering him a kind of job. She was fixing to start a school and wanted him to be the school’s doctor. It wouldn’t be a full-time job, since they had only 144 students to start with. It would only require that he make one trip a week to Parthenon, to check up on things, and to be available in emergencies at all other times. They could pay him twelve dollars and fifty cents a month, a pittance, but it was twelve dollars and fifty cents more than he had been making. Of course, if he were willing to conduct a class, one afternoon a week, teaching hygiene to freshmen, they would add another seven-fifty on top of that, making twenty dollars a month. And if he could coach basketball…? No? Well, coaching basketball was optional, and also voluntary, meaning no pay. Also voluntary was participating in the book drive for the library, if Dr. Swain might himself happen to have, or be able to locate, any suitable volumes?

  He listened to her proposal with gravity. Now we know that Colvin didn’t think much of “school.” His brief experience at the age of eleven with the Stay More school, his memory of the tales Kie Raney had told about his years teaching at the Spunkwater school, and his brief experience at the St. Louis medical school, had pretty much soured Colvin on the concept of an institution of formal learning. He knew he couldn’t coach basketball, and he wasn’t sure he could teach hygiene, whatever that was, but he certainly was willing to be a doctor for the pupils if they needed him.

  He had a question he wanted to ask. Why had she chosen him? Why not one of the doctors in Jasper, which was closer to Parthenon? “Everybody says you’re the best doctor in the world,” she said. “They tell me you practically invented the idea.” He was flattered, and since he needed the money and could easily spare one day a week, or seven for that matter, he agreed to do it. “I have just one question for you,” Miss Jossie said. “Of what persuasion are you? Not that it matters, too much, because we Baptists are tolerant of sects, but we’d just like to know which of the sects you follow.”

  He thought she’d said “sex,” and he answered, “Why, the weaker variety, I reckon.”

  “I don’t believe I know any such,” she said, and he figured she was asserting that she wasn’t weak, herself. “Do you observe Sundays?”

  Colvin was not comfortable discussing sex with a stranger-lady, not unless it had something to do with her own condition. “Any day or night of the week suits me,” he said.

  “Well, then, I don’t suppose it matters which day you come,” she said.

  He blushed and said, “Or night, one.”

  “How about Mondays, starting next Monday?” she asked.

  She was a mighty feisty gal, and he wondered if she was making him a proposition. “Where?” he wondered.

  “Just come to the Academy, to the main building, and you’ll find me,” she said.

  That day we drove up to Parthenon, Colvin showed me, on the ground floor of the big stone building, the small room, now being used just as a storeroom for junk, old textbooks, and supplies. Mice had made a nest in one corner, and a broken window had allowed a free-ranging chicken to come in and lay some eggs. The chicken
flew off with a squawk as we entered. The room had been stripped of whatever furniture it had held, but Colvin showed me where the desk had been, and, by the window, a kind of sofa, a lounge actually, a backless couch with one end curled up into a headrest, which had served as both the examining table and the infirmary bed for the occasional patient who had to stay, but, on Colvin’s first visit to the room, had misled him into thinking that was where Miss Jossie intended to engage in sects, causing the both of them considerable embarrassment, which had ended with Miss Jossie patting her dark hair back into place, straightening her jumper, and saying, “It isn’t that I’m not that sort of girl, I mean, well, I’m really not that sort of girl, you know, but we hardly know each other, now do we? Perhaps after we’ve had a chance to get better acquainted…but aren’t you a married man? Not that I wouldn’t even dream of being with a married man, I mean, I never have, but it isn’t inconceivable, you know, it’s just that it makes it rather complicated, don’t you think? Now please understand I’m not rejecting you, not totally anyway, I just…” She kept on a-talking like that until he interrupted her with a question: Why did she have this here sofa in her office? “My office?” she said, agog. “This is your office. Would you like to see the rest of the building?”

  “Would you like to see the rest of the building, Doc?” Colvin asked me, and took me on a tour. Down the hall was the principal Miss Jossie’s office, perhaps still being used as a principal’s office and smelling of the body odor of one of the four Baptist men who had succeeded Jossie as principal during the school’s decade of existence as Newton County Academy. Two of the larger classrooms were on this floor. An anti-goggling staircase rose to the second-floor auditorium, which still had all two hundred of its seats in place and remained the largest gathering place in the county, larger than the courthouse’s main courtroom or any church. Up there also was the library, one room with two of its walls lined with bookshelves, empty. Colvin had been recruited to “volunteer” for the book drive and had canvassed his neighbors in Stay More for contributions of reading matter, discovering that only one of them had any books, the woman still living in the old Jacob Ingledew house, the lady you’ve chosen to call Whom We Cannot Name, so I will refrain from revealing my knowledge of her name. She contributed to the lie-berry of the Newton County Academy a set of the Brontë sisters, a set of Macaulay’s essays and poems, and a set of Gibbons. From his own meager lie-berry Colvin was able to sacrifice a set of Bulfinch and Mary Olmstead Stanton’s Practical and Scientific Physiognomy; or, How to Read Faces.

  That first day, a most pleasant Monday in October, with the trees and sumac shrubs already turning every color of the warm part of the spectrum and the crisp air hinting of cool days to come, Colvin’s first task was to examine everybody. Teachers first. There were six of them, and Miss Jossie introduced Colvin to his colleagues as she brought each of them to his office for examination: Miss Billie Hood, a high school graduate from downstate, would teach the primary department, first through sixth grades, and had postnasal drip, for which he could only prescribe that she attempt sleeping with two pillows under her head and drink butterfly weed tea instead of coffee. Miss Dulcie Best, a graduate of the big high school at Little Rock, would teach the intermediate department, seventh and eighth grades, and had herpes zoster (shingles), for which he gave his special lotion compounded of herbs. Next, a stunning creature, name of Mrs. Venda Breedlove, a graduate of Jasper High School and Shenandoah Music School, would teach music, and had Ménière’s syndrome, with vertigo and deafness, for which she was under treatment by Dr. McFerrin of Jasper, so Colvin did not wish to intervene, even though Venda was the prettiest lady he’d ever seen outside of Stay More, and she flirted shamelessly with him during his examination of her. Nicholas L. Rainbird, a young possessor of the lone master’s degree, from the same angel factory that had produced Jossie Conklin, would teach history and natural sciences, and would not accept Colvin’s diagnosis that the chancroid lesions in his genital area were venereal; he insisted he had never, never, and would therefore get a second opinion from Dr. McFerrin. Miss Bee Leach, also from that angel factory but with only a “B.M.T.” like her classmate, Jossie, would teach English and Latin (!), which prompted Colvin to offer both his diagnosis and his prescription (for an unmentionable “female trouble”) in that language. Nec amor nec tussis celatur. And finally, Miss Jossie herself, who in addition to her administrative duties would teach arithmetic and something called “business,” and who said, “I don’t have to take off my clothes, do I?” All that he could find wrong with her, with her clothes still on, was that she had a very bad headache, treatable by his special neck massage and some aspirin.

  The student body was much worse off than the faculty, and in the course of what remained of that first morning he was hard-pressed to see all 144 of them and give smallpox vaccinations to those who hadn’t had them. By coincidence, 144 is a dozen dozen, or a gross, and he used up a gross of wooden tongue depressors examining their gross throats and finding some gross disorders and diseases. He also examined their gross anatomies. Those with hookworm he could recognize at once because of their “angel wings”: protruding shoulder blades; those with pellagra he spotted because of their spots, distinguishable from the red dots of those with scarlet fever and the pimples of those with smallpox. There were cases of goiter, bone malformations, and assorted other abnormalities, including one lad, Russ Breedlove, son of the comely music teacher, Venda, who had diphallus (he possessed an extra penis), but did not realize his situation was irregular. Those who did not have a preexisting condition quickly were catching something from someone else, either infectious microbes or lacerations, abrasions, bruises, and punctures in the school-yard brawls necessary for boys to prove themselves to each other on school’s first day, or the rope-skipping (and -tripping) contests the girls were conducting, and all of these wounded were coming to Colvin in droves and exhausting his supply of Mercurochrome, which they learned to call Doc Swain’s “Cure ’em chrome” and wore proudly as a kind of war paint—or, rather, school paint.

  One youth, refusing the antibiotic treatment Colvin tried to give him for his mastoiditis, declared he would just wait until he got home and “dream it off.” Colvin grabbed him by the collar and said, “What’s your name, boy?” and when the young man answered Lum Dinsmore, Colvin said, “You’re from Stay More, aint ye?” and Lum nodded. “Are they any more of ye?” Colvin wanted to know, and Lum told him that Dewey Coe and Opal Whitter were also from Stay More. Colvin got the three of them together in his office, closed the door, and gave them a stern lecture. Had any of them already told any of their classmates about the dream cure? Not yet, they said. Well, then, he said, they must promise him never, ever, under any circumstances, not for personal aggrandizement or gossipy inclination or even cash money, reveal, divulge, or betray, to any of their classmates, that the general populace of Stay More was no longer patronizing their doctors because they had learned how to use the dream cure instead. Their promises alone did not ease his mind, so Colvin threatened them, telling them that if they ever breathed a word of the dream cure to a soul, and then got sick with anything, he would refuse to let them into his dreams. He would stay up all night if he had to.

  Few of the boys who attended Newton County Academy came daily from home, like Lum and Dewey. Most of them lived at such distances that they were boarded out at one of the homes in Parthenon, or they had rooms on the second floor of Casey’s General Store, an impressive stone building in the village. But all of the girls, except the few who already lived nearby, were housed in a dormitory, one of the other big buildings on the hill, just a stone’s throw from the main building. This girls’ dormitory was a fine two-story wooden building, with a hipped roof like the main building and a general style of architecture resembling Jacob Ingledew’s mansion in Stay More but three or four times as big. Colvin showed me the spacious empty room on the main floor that had been the dining room where everybody had their noon dinner together, b
ut he missed his that first day, or rather was late for it, because he had to perform an emergency appendectomy on a student, Ora Casey, who had complained of “cute inner jestion.” She had been his last patient of the morning, and, sitting down to have his dinner with the “help,” the three girls who worked in the kitchen to pay their tuition (three or four dollars a month for those who could afford it), he was exhausted and realized he had only twenty minutes to eat before rushing off to meet his first class in hygiene, whatever that was.

  But those twenty minutes were never forgotten by Colvin, because one of those three kitchen maids was Tenny. As a matter of courtesy, he asked the three of them their names, although he’d already inspected each of them earlier that day, finding asthma in Orva and scoliosis (a spinal curvature) in Olive, but nothing in Tenny, even though the young lady had insisted her right arm was killing her and her stomach really ached clean through all over down to the ground inside out slam to pieces. There were three things that struck him about Tenny: one, she was the only student at the Academy who, despite his thorough examination, was negative, negative, negative, not a thing in the world wrong with her; two, through one of those odd concatenations of circumstance or happenchance or whatever it was, she was the only girl at the Academy whose first name didn’t start with “O”; and three, she was the prettiest little thing he ever laid eyes on. I mean, she was a knockout of a looker. She had plenty of here and there for her age, fifteen, and she might even grow up (not that she wasn’t already fully grown) to look as gorgeous as that music teacher, Mrs. Venda Breedlove, who was a golden blond, but whose hair wasn’t nearly as long and wavy as Tenny’s light-brown hair. In addition to the almost-blond hair that came down nearly to her waist, and eyes that would put the sky to shame, and a mouth which seemed pouty because the lips were so broad and full and ripe, Tenny just had scads of taking ways about her. Oba and Orlena and Oma had eyes that were too far apart in their heads, while Odele and Orpha and Ona had eyes that were too close together, but Tenny’s azure eyes were set just exactly the right distance apart. Olga was too fat and Opal was too thin, but Tenny was just right. A poor girl named Olma had acromegaly, with massive jaws; another one, Obedience, had exophthalmic goiter with a permanent expression of frozen terror; Odessa had an adrenal cortex disease which gave her a heavy beard; and Oneida had myxedema, a very puffy face. Oleta and Orena and Orela had faces that were too pear-shaped, while Omega and Ova and Oklahomy had apple-shaped faces. Tenny was a peach.